


Down to the Bone

by Miss_M



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Phone Calls & Telephones, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-11 15:22:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12938097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “Hello, Kate.”





	Down to the Bone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [damalur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/gifts).



> I own nothing.

Kate’s desk phone rang while she was slogging through the paperwork for the West Phoenix raid. One dead, one in the hospital under armed guard, four in custody, guns, explosives, and cocaine impounded, all together meant a fuckload of forms to be signed or initialed and run past her supervisor for _his_ signature. The official version, in triplicate.

She picked up the phone without glancing at the caller ID. “Macer.”

“Hello, Kate.”

Her heart honest to fucking god skipped a beat. Then it hammered painfully in her chest, her throat felt tight, and sweat prickled on her palms. She squeezed the receiver so it wouldn’t slip out of her grip. Her fingers hurt, she was squeezing so hard. 

_Relax_ , Kate thought. _Relax, relax, fucking_ relax. 

She didn’t trust herself not to drop the receiver if she tried tucking it between shoulder and chin so she could snap the rubber band she wore always on her wrist. She tugged on the rubber band with her teeth, swallowed the tiny gasp when the worn elastic hit the already-sore patch of skin over her pulse point. Goddamn FBI shrink was right about one thing: sometimes the oldest tricks were the most effective. 

Alejandro hadn’t said anything after his greeting. Kate couldn’t even hear him breathing. 

She licked her lips, worked her jaw before speaking. “Hello?”

“Are you busy tomorrow, Kate?”

She exhaled slowly, sucked in a deep breath like a shot of liquor, and caught the rubber band between her teeth a second time, risking Alejandro hearing her labored breathing and the snap of elastic down the phone. Better that than letting out the harsh laugh clawing up her throat. 

He knew better than to ask her how she was, knew that that kind of small talk would be several kinds of dangerous between them. Nor did Kate think this was a casual call, or a preamble to some sort of… invitation? Opening? Some fucking thing. During their short acquaintance, she’d been just a tool for Alejandro to use or a nuisance for him to move out of the way, no more, no less. 

_He could’ve killed me_ , Kate thought for what felt like the thousandth time, _but he didn’t_. Six months of total radio silence after that morning in her apartment, she’d just barely started to convince herself that Alejandro would be just a phantom disturbing her sleep from there on out, and now this. _Hello, Kate, are you busy tomorrow?_ Motherfucker.

“Why?” she asked, her eyes raking the open-plan office. Her caller ID showed a blocked number, of course. Some algorithm somewhere must have been logging the call, but none of her colleagues looked up from their work to notice Kate’s free hand twitching on her desktop, her chest moving with too-rapid breaths.

She tucked her hand out of sight under the desk when Alejandro’s voice reached her again. He sounded muffled, like he was calling her from a bunker or from under deep water. He must have been using a satellite phone. Kate filed away that fact to chew on later, probably while failing to sleep that night, though it gave her nothing specific. He could have been on the South Pole, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert, or sitting in the Starbucks two buildings over. 

“Juan Hidalgo will be in Phoenix tomorrow to visit his mistress,” Alejandro said, his tone as pleasant and neutral as Kate remembered it. “I thought you’d find that information interesting.”

Kate resisted the urge to glance at the wall-length window, as though expecting to find Alejandro watching her through it, fucking levitating five floors up like something out of a horror movie.

Since her little adventure with Alejandro and that cocksucker Matt Graver, Kate had become her field office’s point person for liaising with the DEA, the ATF, Phoenix PD, and the rest of the alphabet soup. Whenever she got well and truly hammered, she’d laugh till she cried about the boost Alejandro and Matt inadvertently had given to her career. If six months earlier the name Juan Hidalgo would have meant nothing to her, she knew now that he was number three in the Obregon Brothers’ cartel, which made him one of the key players trying to muscle in on the void left by Fausto Alarcon’s death and the collapse of his organization. 

“You want me to do a little light housekeeping for you?” Kate said, no longer trying to keep the edge out of her voice. “Make sure your competition is sitting in an American jail and unable to disrupt your hostile takeover?”

Alejandro’s chuckle was as soft as cotton wool. Kate imagined it covering her, like a physical substance, smothering her. She visualized holding Alejandro’s head immersed in a full bathtub, leaning her whole body weight against his back and shoulders, and forcing his head down until he stopped moving. She could almost feel him struggling, then spasming, then stilling under her. Her therapist encouraged positive ideation, but Kate preferred these vivid, violent fantasies: the gun in her hand, the raging strength in her fists, the soft pushback from stricken flesh, Alejandro broken and bleeding in front of her. In six months, she’d only ever felt like masturbating after she ideated something like that. 

Kate drew deep breaths and willed the tremors in her arms and legs to subside as she grabbed a pen and a Post-it. 

“Where in Phoenix? When is Hidalgo due to arrive? How many men with him?”

He told her, the facts crisp and precise as only a man plotting another’s downfall could marshal them. Kate wrote it all down, already planning how many agents and SWAT she’d need. 

Alejandro was throwing her a bone, and that was just how Kate felt: like a dog with a bone. Bloody-minded and determined, although she didn’t really know what she was trying to accomplish. To prove Alejandro wrong? Prove that she could endure in this place, in this fucking anti-insurgent war, in the bloody midst of which she’d lived oblivious until Alejandro opened her eyes?

As though he could read her mind, miles away on the other side of a satellite connection, Alejandro said: “Still fighting the good fight, Kate?”

She had to squeeze her eyes shut and lock her elbows and knees, or the tremors might have dumped her out of her chair. Mother _fucker_. 

“Still here,” she said. “And no, I’m still not like you, not a wolf. That should make it easier for you to eat me.”

She meant to issue a challenge, to let her rapier wit cut a man who’d been hurt so badly nothing could reach him anymore. Instead, her words came out insinuating and almost needy. 

Kate gritted her teeth in the silence which ensued. Goddamn him for unbalancing her like this. No one’s voice on the phone should have been able to do that, not even his, for who was he, in the end? Nobody, just a man. 

Just the hurricane which had ripped through her life and become her whole goddamn world.

She hated Alejandro more than ever for how his voice sounded when at last he spoke. She would not call it kindness or tenderness. She would _not_. He had no right to advise or to scold her, direct her to arrest his competition then expect her to get out of his way. He had no right to any of it, and she had no right to want to cling to the softness in his voice, as if she’d learned nothing in Juarez, in the tunnel, in her apartment that morning when he’d threatened to shoot her and wiped away her tears, and she could smell his cologne and his sweat and feel his warm breath on her wet cheeks.

“It’s not bad that you’re no wolf, Kate. The world needs gentle creatures. But it is bad that you insist on living in the hunting ground.”

“Well, I’m not going anywhere,” she snapped, barely keeping her voice down to a loud whisper.

“I’d expect nothing less from you.” And goddamn him for sounding proud of her too, _well done little girl_.

“Fuck you.” 

She swallowed the _you don’t know me_ poised on the tip of her tongue, because the sad, soul-crushing truth of it was, he did know her. Out of all the things he’d done to her and could still do to her with just a handful of words, she could not forgive him that most of all. 

“I’ll see you around, Alejandro,” Kate added on impulse, felt her heart skip and speed up again at the beginning of an answering chuckle before she hung up.

He would not have reached out if he hadn’t been keeping tabs on her, even from Mexico, so Kate had no doubt that he would cross her path again, sooner or later. Maybe as soon as the next day, after she arrested Juan Hidalgo on Alejandro’s tip-off, and then Alejandro would owe her one, and so round and round the fucking rosie. 

Kate knew that she would never be ready to come into contact with him again, but she would welcome it, whenever and however it happened. To bleed or to hurt or to make him bleed. Blood and bone and stripping away the flesh with her teeth – anything but the fantasies and nightmares consuming her for the past six months. Whatever ended up happening between them, it would not be worth it, but it would be the only thing in her broken, miserable life to make any sense. 

Kate lifted the receiver and dialed Cory Alvarez from Phoenix PD’s SWAT. The arrest of a major person of interest would not arrange itself, however solid the information for which Kate had sold her soul.


End file.
